OTD in early British television: 28 June 1937
John Wyver writes: The afternoon and evening of Monday 28 June 1937 saw one of pre-war television’s most innovative performance programmes. Artists who worked regularly in the Alexandra Palace studios often found the resources of time and space frustrating, but the challenges were greater still for dancers and companies who added a day or two at AP to an existing London engagement or British tour.
Nonetheless, a remarkably cosmopolitan procession went before the cameras, exposing the watchful viewer to a wide range of international dance. Most memorable was the troupe Colonel Wassily de Basil formed in the early 1930s and ran, somewhat fractiously. with fellow impresario and co-founder René Blum. The group claimed the legacy and name of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, which had dissolved on the death of the maestro in 1929.
Performances were given at AP in 1937, 1938 and 1939, but the great innovation came on 28 June in the first summer when a rehearsal class was broadcast from Studio A by a company that included two of the celebrated ‘baby ballerinas’, Tatiana Riabouchinska and Irina Baronova. One remarkable image (above) captures Baronova and George Zoritch dancing the pas de deux from Gluck’s Orphée
Producer D.H. Munro recalled
a completely unscripted, unrehearsed programme… Just a bare studio with one or two odd bits of scenery and Arnold Haskell, the famous ballet critic, in front of a studio monitor to do a running commentary.
The cameramen were in certain positions: one on a low tripod, one overhead in the gantry and another on a tracking dolly and it was shot completely off the cuff. I think it was one of the most successful programmes I ever did.
A critic in The Listener concurred:
To compare the ballet rehearsal recently broadcast from Alexandra Palace to a painting by Degas is perhaps bordering on the trite. On this occasion, however, it happens to be true… the image on the screen of the receiver in many ways suggested a painting.
The experiment was repeated the following summer, again with Haskell as a guide, along with future conductor Georg Solti as accompanist. This time it was the writer Thomas Baird who sang its praises in World Film News for
bringing alive this peculiar quality with a spontaneity and immediacy which belongs to television. This production eavesdropped on reality. It was television doing its own peculiar job and therefore television at its own very best.
[OTD post no. 193; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
The more I look at this BBC publicity photograph, the richer it becomes in my eyes. The informal setting, the unimpressed seated figures, and the rehearsal clothese and bare setting all contrast with the utterly disciplined forus of the dancing couple. The light on the floor, the shadows on the far wall, and the dark of the watching cameras. The whole composition seems thrillingly modern.